


it should have been me

by Abbie



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: (except hong kong we can keep hong kong), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bisexual Male Character, Character Death, Established Relationship, Ficlet Collection, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Rating May Change, Romance, Slow Burn, but it's like an ehhhh wobbly hand kind of character death, if it didn't happen in season 1 or 2 then it just didn't happen, so many different kinds of stories will be found here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22782064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abbie/pseuds/Abbie
Summary: a collection of glimpses into the lives that tommy and oliver might have had together1. caught me by the collar at the graveside2. everyday expressions of love
Relationships: Tommy Merlyn & Oliver Queen, Tommy Merlyn/Oliver Queen
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31





	1. caught me by the collar at the graveside

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you may throw things at me but i reserve the right to duck

Oliver knelt before the grave, brushing away dead leaves with a sigh. He let his fingers linger on the carved letters in the marble, the rough-cut snagging at his skin as it did the still-bleeding wound in his heart.

“I miss you, Mom.”

He held a pair of long-stemmed roses in his other hand, tied together by a slender white ribbon. His fingers shook as he laid the flowers on the short grass against the headstone, wishing as he did every time he visited these last four months that, with everyone in his life who seemed to come back from the dead, maybe for once it could happen and be good, maybe someone could come back and not be _wrong_ , more scar tissue than ghost.

But the wish was never granted. Not his mother. Not his father, never even in the grave beside hers, moved from the manor before it sold to rest in Starling Memorial beside Moira. Not Shado. Not Tommy.

Certainly not himself.

Sara was the only gift, and she was as full of pain and darkness as Oliver was.

How he wished… how he _wished_ that life would deal him a kinder turn. Just once.

Swallowing a bitter knot in his throat, Oliver blinked away a sheen of tears and stood, brushing the dirt from his knees and hands.

With one last longing glance, he turned from his parents’ graves and put his back to the lowering sun, threading the rows of markers further into the cemetery, away from the gates. The deeper in he walked, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket despite mid-September’s evening warmth, the older and more elaborate the grave markers became, spaced less evenly and more particularly clustered.

It was the old-money part of the cemetery, and it was where, of course, the Merlyn family plot was found.

He hadn’t visited in too long. Only once since his visit immediately after returning to Starling. Everything had gone straight to hell at such an accelerated pace, but even without staring at all that was left of Tommy in this world, he was in Oliver’s thoughts and heart always.

He was the beat beneath the sorrow and the courage, his memory both pain and promise. Tommy was never not with him, in every breath, the missing him in every one of Oliver’s molecules, the vibration on which he moved through the world.

They had been inseparable from _birth_. From birth until… until the _Gambit_.

And after, the world never let them truly reunite. Whether others held literal guns to their heads, or they were separated by oceans, or the gulf of Oliver’s lies and secrets and the things he couldn’t say without drowning in his own blood…

He had missed Tommy for so long he wouldn’t have thought death could make it hurt more, but he had, of course, been wrong.

As he should have known, should have learned by now, he could always hurt more.

He was staring at his feet as he walked, ruminating on loss, and raised his head as he at last approached the Merlyn plot.

His feet stumbled.

Stopped.

He wasn’t alone.

Oliver’s entire body tensed one muscle at a time, his eyes blowing wide and then narrowing to dangerous slits at the broad-shouldered silhouette standing in front of the grave of Tommy Merlyn.

More than once over the last year, Oliver had received a call from the Starling Memorial caretaker with the bad news that the Merlyn graves had been graffitied or vandalized. He had had to pay to have Rebecca’s headstone replaced after a chunk of it had been broken off, and it had felt like swallowing broken glass to imagine if Tommy had had to live to see his mother’s marker defaced.

If the stranger he approached now had any intention of directing misplaced anger at the memorial of his best friend or his mother, Oliver was ready to settle coldly and far too comfortably into the thrum of violence rising under his skin.

He softened his steps as he moved closer, hands slipping carefully free of his jacket pockets. He approached sideways, trying to keep the setting sun out of his eyes as he angled to catch sight of the stranger’s face.

The light and the hour were against him as he closed in on the figure from the side, their profile too much shadow to resolve into identity.

As if to answer his thought—though more likely, to answer a preset timer—a discreet electric lamppost flickered to life yards away beneath the branches of an elderly oak. The faintly blue light cast new angles of illumination on the stranger—

Oliver stumbled, stopped, for the second time.

The anger, the violence snuffed out in him like a candle, and he was left hollowed but for the echoing shock. His eyes rounded under brows tugged into a knot of agony, his mouth falling open but no air coming in.

He couldn’t breathe. His heart seized tight as a fist, and his vision darkened, swooped.

The stranger— _stranger stranger stranger shadow dream lie_ —sighed, and it was like a trigger, or a bowstring twanged with release, and Oliver’s lungs flooded on a gasp. The inhalation wrenched his entire body back to sensation, to presence, with a violence more knives and needles than awakening prickles.

For a moment, his lips, his limbs, were numb but too alive, clumsy and painful with awareness as he staggered a step forward, and then another.

The next was surer.

The one after fell like thunder.

Oliver covered the last, short distance like it was eternity and his chest heaved from the marathon of those few strides. His hands rose, shaking, and he all but caught himself on snatching that coat collar, steadying himself as much as pulling the _stranger_ around to face him.

“Hi, Ollie.”

 _Tommy Merlyn_ stared far too calmly into Oliver’s face, looking unruffled, unsurprised, even as the ground under Oliver’s feet threatened to crumble and reform as something new and unfamiliar.

He looked…

 _Alive_.

Changed.

Like more than a memory.

Sideburns shorter, the shadow on his jaw a carefully trimmed almost-beard, rather than the unshaven jaw of a man too betrayed and heartbroken to pretend to vanity. Oliver’s fist shook on the lapel of a long brown coat knotted in his fingers with the front of a soft navy sweater.

It wasn’t the pale blue shirt Tommy had died in.

Or the painfully stark white of the one he’d been buried in.

“You’re not real.” The protest was heavy on his tongue, sticky on lips that felt too thick to form the words properly. “I’ve dreamed you before, this, you’re… you’re not _real_.”

The stranger that was Tommy Merlyn didn’t argue, only tipped his head to the side on an angle that matched the cut of his wry smirk, the quirk of that one eyebrow. The look was more answer, more counterpunch, than anything he might have said.

His hands raised, slow and carefully open, to settle on Oliver’s wrists. He squeezed, and his skin was warm, the pressure of his grip too solid against Oliver’s bones to be a projection of longing.

Something infinitely fragile trembled in the chambers of his heart.

“You’re dead.” It came out choked, almost a sob.

For a moment, he wanted to be angry, wanted to doubt and embrace suspicion and dread, to brace himself to be disappointed.

But it was Tommy, and the truth, the knowing of it was too rooted in his marrow to deny or question.

“Yeah,” Tommy agreed, sounding sorry, sounding resigned. “Technically, I am. For a while, I even was.”

Shaking in every inch, Oliver loosed his grip on Tommy’s collar, but only to transfer his hands to his neck, fingers curling around either side. Under his skin, Tommy’s pulse raced steadily on. Oliver stared at his hands, the furrow between his brows deep from pain, the tears spilling off his lashes hot from hope.

Tommy laughed, a soft breath of a sound, and Oliver felt it under his palms, the rumble in his throat.

Swallowing something barbed and deadly and beautiful, Oliver skimmed his hands up to fit Tommy’s jaw in the cradle of them, and he let his eyes follow the trace, and past, cataloging every feature he’d known so long he could recall this face better than his own. “How? _How?_ What… where have you been?”

Smiling sadly, Tommy’s head shook back and forth in Oliver’s loose hold. His fingers were still circled around Oliver’s wrists, anchorpoint, tether. “I’m here now.”

Oliver’s legs almost buckled, the toes of his shoes bumping against Tommy’s as he let gravity only tug him closer. “You’re here.” Close enough now to feel the living heat of Tommy’s breath, he dropped his forehead against Tommy’s. All he could see was Tommy’s clear blue eyes, living, bright, vivid enough to at least temporarily overwrite the memory of them sightless and dull. “You’re _here_.”

Tommy took his hands from Oliver’s wrists and curled one around the back of Oliver’s neck. Oliver let his eyes fall shut, let the tears fall again, pressed his forehead more firmly against Tommy’s, like he could tie them by touch so they could never be separated again.

“I’m here,” Tommy breathed, and his nose shifted against Oliver’s.

The first brush of Tommy’s mouth was a shock, electric. Oliver gasped, but didn’t pull away from the second brush, lips grazing lips.

This was a memory older than either of their deaths, and it fluttered in Oliver’s chest, startled, nervous. The hand on the back of his neck squeezed, and Oliver tilted his head just to the left for a press, a kiss that was here and now, neither memory nor ghost.

It wasn’t chaste, but it wasn’t on fire with passion or need. It was something like confirmation, even tasting of the salt of Oliver’s tears.

And then it broke.

Tommy pulled back only far enough to breathe, to look Oliver in the eye. Oliver didn’t understand how he could look so calm when Oliver felt like he was shaking apart from too much hope and too much heartbreak, two gravities pulling him with equal strength in opposite directions.

“I’m sorry,” Tommy murmured, and Oliver didn’t know why he sounded so sad.

“Don’t say that,” he insisted heatedly, tightening his hold on Tommy’s face, unwilling to let him move any further away from him than this. Those words clanged in his ears like a car crash, dissonant echoes of Tommy’s dying goodbye. “Don’t ever say that again.”

Tommy sighed and briefly closed his eyes, looking resigned. Oliver stroked his thumb along the arch of his cheekbone, both to feel him real against his skin and to try to erase whatever made Tommy look like that.

There was no warning before the knife caught him between the ribs.

Tommy’s eyes opened again, the hand at the back of Oliver’s neck still anchor-firm. “But I _am_ sorry, Ollie.”

“Wh…” Oliver’s shaking only intensified as he looked down in confusion, reality twisted out of joint too many times in too short a span.

But there was Tommy’s hand around the hilt of a knife, the blade sunk deeply in Oliver’s side and blood spreading quick and dark on the muted umber of his sweater.

The blade jerked free at the same time as Tommy’s hand snatched from the back of Oliver’s neck, and his fingers slipped nerveless from Tommy’s face. Oliver stumbled back, feeling colder from the loss of the touch than the pull of the blade.

He covered the wound in his side with his hand, and the blood made no _sense_ to him. His vision swam, sudden and sickening, and one leg buckled beneath him, taking him down to one knee.

Poison.

The scuff of a sole against the dirt. A light touch on Oliver’s shoulder, than a heavier press of a hand.

Oliver looked up and had to blink to find Tommy’s face. He stood above him and just looked… sorrowful.

“I don’t understand.” The words slurred in Oliver’s mouth, dissolving, slipping away from him.

A wave of agony crashed over him, bringing him down to both knees, and he almost fell over as it ebbed to an overwhelming weakness.

Tommy caught him, kneeling with him now, one hand on Oliver’s chest, the other covering Oliver’s over the wound. Oliver stared down at their hands pressed together, pressed together and staining slowly red.

Tommy sighed.

Oliver raised his head, his skull feeling too loose on his neck as he sought and found Tommy’s eyes. “Not supposed to be like this,” he mumbled, even his thoughts slippery and fading now. “Just… just got you back. Wasn’t s’posed… to lose you again.”

“I’m here, Ollie.” Tommy lifted the hand on Oliver’s chest to wipe away the tear that dropped down Oliver’s cheek. “You’re not losing me. It’s me losing you.”

“‘S not fair,” Oliver exhaled, feeling now like even the breath in his lungs was slipping away from him. His head lolled on his neck, cheek pressing into Tommy’s palm. “Why?”

“If you find out,” Tommy said, slow and ponderous, eyes searching Oliver’s, “let me know.”

Oliver’s eyelids were too heavy now to keep open. Tommy’s voice was the last thing he lost his grip on, spiraling slowly away into the dark.

“Maybe next time we can make it be different.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you are familiar with basically my magnum opus, long way down, you can assume this tommy is very akin to that one


	2. everyday expressions of love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tommy struggles to speak the thing he feels so deeply

Tommy was a terrible boyfriend.

He knew it. And Oliver had to know it.

He was clingy and insecure, and messed up emotionally and psychologically.

With the way his family had fallen apart so spectacularly when he was so young, he might have been doomed from the start. Especially given his father’s version of paternal love. It all tied together not in a bow, but a tangled knot, leaving Tommy Merlyn a man who desperately craved love and reassurance, but who was skittish as hell about the risk of overinvesting.

Being in a relationship with Oliver Queen should have been the answer that _solved_ him, right? They’d been together since the diaper days, even if it took well more than twenty years to be _together_. But if anyone should make Tommy feel certain, make it impossible for Tommy to doubt he was wanted, wouldn’t be left the second he put all-in, it should be Oliver.

Yet still, every time Tommy felt the words perch on his lips, he swallowed and choked on them. He hated how much “I love you” tasted of fear in his mouth.

The deficiency stung him all the more for how easily love came to Oliver, when Tommy let himself admit it.

In their youth, Oliver had always been frustrated by the complexity of feeling and the inadequacy of words. Somewhere along the way in growing up and going through hell and coming out the other side, however, he’d seemed to click that puzzle piece into place.

Oliver’s love was in everything, if Tommy let himself _see_ it instead of looking for the catch.

It was the mornings without alarms, when Tommy woke slowly to warmth and the heavy security of Oliver against his back, arm around his waist, breathing against his shoulder. Oliver was always awake ages before Tommy, sharp and in motion while Tommy groped his way through his routine with his eyes closed. But mornings like these, Oliver stayed in bed just to hold him, somehow having picked up that Tommy hated to wake up alone.

The love was in the touching, the ease of it, the constancy. Before Oliver’s hellish ordeal, they’d always touched easily, arms around shoulders and open, clinging hugs, leaning against each other just because they were in reach. They were so familiar to each other’s physical presence from earliest memory he’d used to joke they might as well have shared a womb. It was a joke that wore thin over the years, even after learning they shared a sister, because the truth was they hadn’t loved each other like brothers. They’d just been in love.

And after… After all the scars and the bruises to psyche and flesh, Oliver had held himself apart, shied deftly from the sudden reach of a hand, or close brush in a crowd.

Except for with Tommy. He hadn’t shied from Tommy, and the first hug _after_ had been the real homecoming. Even if it took time and work to let Tommy see and touch the most painful parts of what he carried, Tommy had known every bitter secret and every scar to which he pressed his lips was a gift of Oliver’s trust. Of his love.

So was the coffee brewed and waiting for him in the mornings, and the shirts that magically appeared in his closet, always in his favorite colors and the right cut. Hell, it was in the words.

It was whispered in the dark as they moved together in bed, and mumbled against Tommy’s chest as they drifted to sleep. It was pressed warmly to his cheek before Oliver went out the door, murmured fondly into the crown of his head when Tommy was deep in budget spreadsheets and inventory lists.

It could break Tommy’s heart if he listed all the evidence, because he was scared his own would never measure up.

He could make omelettes every Saturday and bring Oliver a container of homemade pasta down into that musty basement to make sure he ate. He could work the knots out of Oliver’s muscles when he came home late and too exhausted to do anything but fall face first on the bed. When Oliver woke to nightmares and violent memories, Tommy could gentle him down til Oliver let him hold him, let him sing to him quietly to draw him back to the here and now.

But what did any of that really matter if Tommy couldn’t say it out loud?

This, he was certain, was why he was a terrible boyfriend, and why it was just a matter of time before Oliver realized he deserved better and left him.

This certainty—this _fear—_ swelled and buzzed in his chest, a constant swarm of wasps stinging him with anxiety and doubt. He could feel it pushing against his ribs, threatening to burst behind his sternum, stretching his skin tighter and tighter until—

It happened on the couch, on an unremarkable Tuesday night.

Tommy was slouched into Oliver’s side, both their legs stretched out to prop on the coffee table. Oliver’s arm was a comfortable weight around his shoulders, the TV a pleasant mindless murmur across from them, less entertainment than color and sound and an excuse to breathe against each other.

Oliver’s fingers trailed up and down Tommy’s arm, knuckles grazing from shoulder to elbow, back again, slow, steady, just the right pressure to say _I’m here_.

What a small thing. A simple gesture.

The needle prick that burst the feeling in his chest.

“I love you,” he blurted, too loud, too forceful. He cringed as Oliver’s fingers stilled against his skin. Swallowing his pride, and the fear with it, he shifted to look Oliver in the face, his own tugging in desperate, pleading lines of earnestness. “You know that, right?”

Oliver looked at him, only inches away, his expression calm, relaxed but for the faintly contemplative line between his brows.

“Ollie?” Tommy asked, voice smaller for the uncertainty.

Oliver’s mouth curled at the corners just before he leaned in to press that curve of a smile to Tommy’s lips. The hand on his shoulder dragged slow and warm to the back of Tommy’s neck as Oliver kissed him firm and lingering. He stole another before he pulled back, only far enough to lean their foreheads together.

Tommy could have drowned in those eyes. He set his hand over Oliver’s heart as if he could draw the heavy beat into his own chest, to keep forever.

“Of course I know, Tommy.” Oliver’s thumb stroked behind Tommy’s ear, another reassurance, another drop of love. “You tell me all the time.”

“Oh.” It was an exhale, stunned but… awed.

Oliver nudged his nose against Tommy’s, all affection.

Tommy tipped his chin up and chased Oliver’s lips with his own, and between each press, between each heartbeat, the words echoed.

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a nice little fluff chaser for the angst gutpunch that was the first chapter ;)


End file.
